Shannon Gowe EDSE 584 April 22, 2014 Project RESPECT - Reflection It was difficult to imagine a curriculum based

in social justice in a beginning language class, and I thought when this started I would have my work cut out for me. However, as I read the assigned articles, I looked for ways that I could apply the ideas to teaching French, otherwise they would be pointless. I have always found something, even if it was a small kernel of wisdom that could be added to my tools of teaching. As Jacqueline Irvine points out in her article Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, at the core this kind of teaching engages and motivates students (58). If students are not engaged and motivated, learning will not occur easily and the best way to accomplish this is by using their lives, their preferences, and their cultures. I have seen Project RESPECT as an opportunity to help students reflect on their own culture in relation to the material learned in class and broaden their perspectives of the world. While teaching French provides daily opportunities to learn about and discuss French and francophone culture, it was important for me to envision ways to include the diverse cultures of students in my classroom. Most classes are not linguistically advanced enough to have conversations about more than the self, family, and friends, especially not weighty social and political issues often included in addressing social justice. I have come to realize that culturally responsive pedagogy does not always involve sophisticated or complex discussion. It can be simply knowing my students and using their lives as text. This is one of the points that Linda Christensen makes as she talks about how to mold the

curriculum around students experiences. The teacher is not the conveyor of knowledge, rather, we are engaging in a dialogue with them, so they are partners in their education (Golden 60). In some ways this is already included in the French classroom. For example, in a beginning level language class, I know what students like and dislike, what they like to wear, what time they get to school, what time they wake up, what their daily routine is, their favorite activities, sports, hobbies, classes, movies and television shows, how many brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles they have, and all of the above about their friends and family members. In the case of this unit, I know what the students eat and drink for breakfast, lunch and dinner, their favorite restaurants and recipes, their favorite holidays, their special meals, what they give and gave to each member of their family as gifts, and what they receive and received. Their lives are the material for basic communication. I can use this basis of meaningful communication to build on an advanced and thoughtful reflection on culture and language. This project also helped me to really consider the backgrounds and the range of abilities and interests of the students in my classes. Sonia Nieto talks about asking the hard questions about multicultural education, including the ones about which students are taking which classes (Nieto 8). So whos taking French and whos succeeding at reaching the highest levels of it? On further examination of my classes I found that my French 3 honors classes, while still diverse, did not reflect the same racial demographics of the school in general, while French 1 and 2 both did. This could be evidence of the historical and sociopolitical privilege of certain students over others, although the highest performing students in my classes are of many different races and social classes. At Spring

Valley, French and all other foreign language classes are electives. Most students take it to get their two credits to get into college. Below the honors level 3, there is no division of students into advanced or remedial levels of French, it is all-encompassing. I think this is most evident in French 2. It includes students of all grades and maturity levels, and some from different middle school teachers. I did not realize it at first, but I actually chose the most difficult class for this project. It is the largest with 29 students and the most polarized in abilities and academic performance. I have a handful of students who always know the answer and raise their hands within one second of me asking a question. I have a couple students who cannot seem to remember if they are in Spanish class or French class. I have some who have great things to say if only they would speak up, and one whose answer to everything is la glace (ice cream). As I compiled my class profile with information on the students, I found out that I had 10 students labeled as gifted and talented. I was shocked by a couple of the students who had this label because they were failing French not just because of laziness. It made me more disappointed when I observed repeated failures because I expected more from gifted students. This was the wrong attitude. It showed me more than anything that I do not care to know the labels the school or test scores give my students, and I should not base my expectations for students on their academic categorization, but on the potential I see in them. I prefer to see them all as capable and it is my challenge to provide the path that allows them to demonstrate their abilities. It is important to resist tendency to change my expectations based on labels and in the same way combat the deficit perspective. With all this in mind, I had to design lessons that considered the range of skills of my students and also their interests. For the unit on holidays, I used a variety of activities in all

modes of communication and that appealed to all of the senses, including taste with the opportunity to prepare French cuisine and share it with the class. Assignments like the group party planning and the blog post allowed success for all students because they were formulaic enough for those who needed structure and open-ended enough to leave room for the high achievers to show their abilities. In order to address some of the students lagging in the area of accuracy and grammar, I started doing show me that you studied assignments. Sometimes it was writing sentences on various topics with different verbs. Another time it was creating an artistic graphic organizer that explained the use of object pronouns within the unit themes. Assignments like these and the food day allowed students to show their creativity in different ways, while maintaining academic rigor. When presenting content, I tried to use examples from my own experiences and authentic texts to fill in the gaps. I think the lesson about la Fte Nationale and la Marseillaise was an opportunity for comparison and reflection on cultural ideas without leaning on stereotypes. I also was grateful for the real life exchange they had in their blog posts. They presented themselves firsthand and they read about other students lives firsthand. It was meaningful because it allowed students to think about the perspectives of the students on the other side of the blog and about how the French students saw them. A good language class is naturally culturally responsive because part of it involves self-reflection. You cannot make progress to understanding another language and culture if you are not comparing it to your own. I would be failing my students if I did not give them opportunities for this. In the article Cultural Ways of Learning, Gutierrez and Rogoff talk about how we view students individual and cultural traits: We argue that people live culture in a mutually constitutive manner in which it is not fruitful to tote up their

characteristics as if they occur independently of culture, and of culture as if it occurs independently of people (21). Students in a language class must understand this when they reflect on their lives and know that they cannot be reduced to a simple list of traits, just as they cannot do this to the people who speak the language they are studying. As students study French and the people who speak it, they are examining themselves, their language and their culture. How does my society define me? How do others see me and my culture? How do I see myself? My goal is to constantly challenge my students reflect on and question their ideas about themselves and others. As adolescents they are still shaping their culture, school being part of it, and I should always be aware of the potential of my class to influence the breadth and depth of their knowledge and the way they approach the world.